After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

  When he opened the door, the two were sitting at least fifteen feet apart. Virginia was at the soda counter, pensively eating a chocolate and banana split; seated in an elegant pose on one of the pink satin arm-chairs, Dr. Obispo was in the process of lighting a cigarette.

  On Mr. Stoyte the impact of suspicion and jealousy was like the blow of a fist directed (for the shock was physical and localized in the midriff) straight to the solar plexus. His face contracted as though with pain. And yet he had seen nothing; there was no apparent cause for jealousy, no visible reason, in their attitudes, their actions, their expressions, for suspicion. Dr. Obispo’s manner was perfectly easy and natural; and the Baby’s smile of startled and delighted welcome was angelic in its candour. “Uncle Jo!” She ran to meet him and threw her arms round his neck. “Uncle Jo!”

  The warmth of her tone, the softness of her lips had a magical effect on Mr. Stoyte. Moved to a point at which he was using the word to the limit of its double connotation, he murmured, “My Babyl” with a lingering emphasis. The fact that he should have felt suspicious, even for a moment, of this pure and adorable, this deliciously warm, resilient and perfumed child, filled him with shame. And even Dr. Obispo now heaped coals of fire on his head.

  “I was a bit worried,” he said, as he got up from his chair, “by the way you coughed after lunch. That’s why I came up here, to make sure of catching you the moment you got in.” He put a hand in his pocket and, after half drawing out and immediately replacing a little leather-bound volume, like a prayer book, extracted a stethoscope. “Prevention’s better than cure,” he went on. “I’m not going to let you get influenza, if I can help it.”

  Remembering what a good week they had had at the Beverly Pantheon on account of the epidemic, Mr. Stoyte felt alarmed. “I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I guess that cough wasn’t anything. Only my old—you know: the chronic bronchitis.”

  “Maybe it was only that. But all the same, I’d like to listen in.” Briskly professional, Dr. Obispo hung the stethoscope round his neck.

  “He’s right, Uncle Jo,” said the Baby.

  Touched by so much solicitude and at the same time rather disturbed by the thought that it might perhaps be influenza, Mr. Stoyte took off his coat and waistcoat and began to undo his tie. A moment later he was stand ing stripped to the waist under the crystals of the chandelier. Modestly, Virginia retired again to her soda fountain. Dr. Obispo slipped the ends of the curved nickel tubes of the stethoscope into his ears. “Take a deep breath,” he said as he pressed the muzzle against Mr. Stoyte’s chest. “Again,” he ordered. “Now cough.” Looking past that thick barrel of hairy flesh, he could see, on the wall behind, the inhabitants of Watteau’s mournful paradise as they prepared to set sail for some other paradise, doubtless yet more heartbreaking.

  “Say ninety-nine,” Dr. Obispo commanded, returning from the embarcation for Cythera to a near view of Mr. Stoyte’s thorax and abdomen.

  “Ninety-nine,” said Mr. Stoyte. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-nine.”

  With professional thoroughness, Dr. Obispo shifted the muzzle of his stethoscope from point to point on the curving barrel of flesh before him. There was nothing wrong, of course, with the old buzzard. Just the familiar set of râles and wheezes he always had. Perhaps it would make things a bit more realistic if he were to take the creature down to his office and stick him up in front of the fluoroscope. But, no; he really couldn’t be bothered. And, besides, this farce would be quite enough.

  “Cough again,” he said, planting his instrument among the grey hairs on Mr. Stoyte’s left pap. And among other things, he went on to reflect, while Mr. Stoyte forced out a succession of artificial coughs, among other things, these old sacks of guts didn’t smell too good. How any young girl could stand it, even for money, he really couldn’t imagine. And yet the fact remained that there were thousands of them who not only stood it, but actually enjoyed it. Or, perhaps, “enjoy” was the wrong word. Because in most cases there probably wasn’t any question of enjoyment in the proper, physiological sense of the word. It all happened in the mind, not in the body. They loved their old gut-sacks with their heads; loved them because they admired them, because they were impressed by the gut-sack’s position in the world, or his knowledge, or his celebrity. What they slept with wasn’t the man; it was a reputation, it was the embodiment of a function. And then, of course, some of the girls were future models for Mother’s Day advertisements; some were little Florence Nightingales, on the lookout for a Crimean War. In those cases, the very infirmities of their gut-sacks were added attractions. They had the satisfaction of sleeping not only with a reputation or a stock of wisdom, not only with a federal judgeship, for example, or the presidency of a chamber of commerce, but also and simultaneously with a wounded soldier, with an imbecile child, with a lovely stinking little baby who still made messes in its bed. Even this cutie (Dr. Obispo shot a sideways glance in the direction of the soda fountain), even this one had something of the Florence Nightingale in her, something of the Gold Star Mother. (And that in spite of the fact that, with her conscious mind, she felt a kind of physical horror of maternity.) Jo Stoyte was a little bit her baby and her patient; and at the same time, of course, he was a great deal her own private Abraham

  Lincoln. Incidentally, he also happened to be the man with the cheque book. Which was a consideration, of course. But if he were only that, Virginia wouldn’t have been so nearly happy as she obviously was. The cheque book was made more attractive by being in the hands of a demigod who had to have a nanny to change his diapers.

  “Turn round, please.”

  Mr. Stoyte obeyed. The back, Dr. Obispo reflected, was perceptibly less revolting than the front. Perhaps because it was less personal.

  “Take a deep breath,” he said; for he was going to play the farce all over again on this new stage. “Another.”

  Mr. Stoyte breathed enormously, like a cetacean.

  “And again,” said Dr. Obispo, reflecting as the old man snorted, that his own chief asset was a refreshing unlikeness to this smelly old gut-sack. She would take him, and take him, what was more, on his own terms. No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular-song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake. The real, essential, concrete thing; no less, it went without saying, but also (and this most certainly didn’t go without saying for the bitches were always trying to get you to stick them on pedestals, or be their soul-mates), also no more. No more, to begin with, out of respect for scientific truth. He believed in scientific truth. Facts were facts; accept them as such. It was a fact, for example, that young girls in the pay of rich old men could be seduced without much difficulty. It was also a fact that rich old men, however successful at business, were generally so frightened, ignorant and stupid that they could be bamboozled by any intelligent person who chose to try.

  “Say ninety-nine again,” he said aloud.

  “Ninety-nine. Ninety-nine.”

  Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that they would never find out anything. That was the fact about old men. The fact about love was that it consisted essentially of tumescence and detumescence. So why embroider the fact with unnecessary fictions? Why not be realistic? Why not treat the whole business scientifically?

  “Ninety-nine,” Mr. Stoyte went on repeating. “Ninety-nine.”

  And then, Dr. Obispo went on to reflect, as he listened without interest to the whisperings and crepitations inside the warm, smelly barrel before him, then there were the more personal reasons for preferring to take love unadorned, in the chemically pure condition. Personal reasons that were, also, of course, a fact that had to be accepted. For it was a fact that he personally found an added pleasure in the imposition of his will upon the partner he had chosen. To be pleasurable, this imposition of will must never be too easy, too much a matter of course. Which ruled out all professionals. The partner had to be an amateur and, like all amateurs, co
mmitted to the thesis that tumescence and detumescence should always be associated with LOVE, PASSION, SOUL-MATING—all in upper-case letters. In imposing his will, he imposed the contradictory doctrine, the doctrine of tumescence and detumescence for tumescence^ and detumescence’s sake. All he asked was that a partner should give the thesis a practical tryout—however reluctantly, however experimentally, for just once only; he didn’t care. Just a single tryout. After that it was up to him. If he couldn’t make a permanent and enthusiastic convert of her, at any rate so far as he was concerned, then the fault was his.

  “Ninety-nine, ninety-nine,” said Mr. Stoyte with exemplary patience.

  “You can stop now,” Dr. Obispo told him graciously.

  Just one tryout; he could practically guarantee himself success. It was a branch of applied physiology; he was an expert, a specialist. The Claude Bernard of the subject. And talk of imposing one’s will! You began by forcing the girl to accept a thesis that was in flat contradiction to all the ideas she had been brought up with, all the dreams-come-true rigmarole of popular ideology. Quite a pleasant little victory, to be sure. But it was only when you got down to the applied physiology that the series of really satisfying triumphs began. You took an ordinarily rational human being, a good hundred-percent American with a background, a position in society, a set of conventions, a code of ethics, a religion (Catholic in the present instance, Dr. Obispo remembered parenthetically); you took this good citizen, with rights fully and formally guaranteed by the Constitution, you took her (and perhaps she had come to the place of assignation in her husband’s Packard limousine and direct from a banquet, with speeches in honor, say, of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler or the retiring Archbishop of Indianapolis), you took her and you proceeded, systematically and scientifically, to reduce this unique personality to a mere epileptic body, moaning and gibbering under the excruciations of a pleasure for which you, the Claude Bernard of the subject, were responsible and of which you remained the enjoying, but always detached, always ironically amused, spectator.

  “Just a few more deep breaths, if you don’t mind.”

  Wheezily Mr. Stoyte inhaled, then with a snorting sigh emptied his lungs.

  Chapter XI

  THERE was silence after Mr. Stoyte’s departure. A long silence, while each of the three men thought his own private thoughts. It was Pete who spoke first.

  “Things like that,” he said gloomily, “they get me kind of wondering if I ought to go on taking his money. What would you do, Mr. Propter, if you were me?”

  “What would I do?” Mr. Propter reflected for a moment. “I’d go on working in Jo’s laboratory,” he said. “But only so long as I felt fairly certain that what I was doing wouldn’t cause more harm than good. One has to be a utilitarian in these matters. A utilitarian with a difference,” he qualified. “Bentham crossed with Eckhart, say, or Nagarjuna.”

  “Poor Bentham!” said Jeremy, horrified by the thought of what was being done to his namesake.

  Mr. Propter smiled. “Poor Bentham, indeed! Such a good, sweet, absurd, intelligent man! So nearly right; but so enormously wrong! Deluding himself with the notion that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be achieved on the strictly human level—the level of time and evil, the level of the absence of God. Poor Bentham!” he repeated. “What a great man he would have been if only he could have grasped that good can’t be had except where it exists!”

  “That sort of utilitarian you’re talking about,” said Pete, “what would he feel about the job I’m doing now?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Propter answered. “I haven’t thought about it enough to guess what he’d say. And anyhow we haven’t yet got the empirical material on which a reasonable judgment could be based. All I know is that if I were in on this I’d be cautious. Infinitely cautious,” he insisted.

  “And what about the money?” Pete went on. “Seeing where it comes from and who it belongs to, do you think I ought to take it?”

  “All money’s pretty dirty,” said Mr. Propter. “I don’t know that poor Jo’s is appreciably dirtier than any one else’s. You may think it is; but that’s only because, for the first time, you’re seeing money at its source—its personal, human source. You’re like one of those city children who have been used to getting their milk in sterilized bottles from a shiny white delivery wagon. When they go into the country and see it being pumped out of a big, fat, smelly old animal, they’re horrified, they’re disgusted. It’s the same with money. You’ve been used to getting it from behind a bronze grating in a magnificent marble bank. Now, you’ve come out into the country and are living in the cow shed with the animal that actually secretes the stuff. And the process doesn’t strike you as very savoury or hygienic. But the same process was going on, even when you didn’t know about it. And if you weren’t working for Jo Stoyte, you’d probably be working for some college or university. But where do colleges and universities get their money from? From rich men. In other words, from people like Jo Stoyte. Again, it’s dirt served out in sterile containers—by a gentleman in a cap and gown, this time.”

  “So you figure it’s all right for me to go on like I am now?” said Pete.

  “All right,” Mr. Propter answered, “in the sense that it’s not conspicuously worse than anything else.” Suddenly smiling, “I was glad to hear that Dr. Mulge had got his art school,” he said in another, lighter tone. “Immediately after the Auditorium, too. It’s a lot of money. But I suppose the prestige of being a patron of learning is worth it. And, of course, there’s an enormous social pressure on the rich to make them become patrons of learning. They’re being pushed by shame as well as pulled by the longing to believe they’re the benefactors of humanity. And happily with Dr. Mulge a rich man can have his kudos with safety. No amount of art schools at Tarzana will ever disturb the status quo. Whereas if I were to ask Jo for fifty thousand dollars to finance research into the technique of democracy, he’d turn me down flat. Why? Because he knows that sort of thing is dangerous. He likes speeches about democracy. (Incidentally, Dr. Mulge is really terrific on the subject.) But he doesn’t approve of the coarse materialists who try to find out how to put those ideals into practice. You saw how angry he got about my poor little sun machine. Because, in its tiny way, it’s a menace to the sort of big business he makes his money from. And it’s the same with these other little gadgets that I’ve talked to him about from time to time. Come and look, if it doesn’t bore you.”

  He took them into the house. Here was the little electric mill, hardly larger than a coffee machine, in which he ground his own flour, as he needed it. Here was the loom at which he had learnt and was now teaching others to weave. Next he took them out to the shed in which, with a few hundred dollars’ worth of electrically operated tools, he was equipped to do any kind of carpentry and even some light metal work. Beyond the shed were the still unfinished greenhouses; for the vegetable plots weren’t adequate to supply the demands of his transients. There they were, he added, pointing through the increasing darkness to the lights of a row of cabins. He could put up only a few of them; the rest had to live in a sort of garbage heap down in the dry bed of the river—paying rent to Jo Stoyte for the privilege. Not the best material to work with, of course. But such misery as theirs left one no choice. They simply had to be attended to. A few had come through undemoralized; and, of these, a few could see what had to be done, what you had to aim at. Two or three were working with him here; and he had been able to raise money to settle two or three more on some land near Santa Suzanna. Mere beginnings—unsatisfactory, at that. Because, obviously, you could not even start experimenting properly until you had a full-fledged community working under the new conditions. But to set a community on its feet would require money. A lot of money. But rich men wouldn’t touch the work; they preferred art schools at Tarzana. The people who were interested had no money; that was one of the reasons why they were interested. Borrowing at the current commercial rates was dangerous. Except in v
ery favourable circumstances, the chances were that you’d merely be selling yourself into slavery to a bank.

  “It isn’t easy,” said Mr. Propter, as they walked back to the house. “But the great point is that, easy or not easy, it’s there, waiting to be done. Because, after all, Pete, there is something to do.”

  Mr. Propter went into the bungalow for a moment to turn out the lights, then emerged again on to the porch. Together, the three men walked down the path to the road. Before them the castle was a vast black silhouette punctured by occasional lights.

  “There is something you can do,” Mr. Propter resumed; “but only on condition that you know what the nature of the world happens to be. If you know that the strictly human level is the level of evil, you won’t waste your time trying to produce good on that level. Good manifests itself only on the animal level and on the level of eternity. Knowing that, you’ll realize that the best you can do on the human level is preventive. You can see that purely human activities don’t interfere too much with the manifestation of good on the other levels. That’s all. But politicians don’t know the nature of reality. If they did, they wouldn’t be politicians. Reactionary or revolutionary, they’re all humanists, all romantics. They live in a world of illusion, a world that’s a mere projection of their own human personalities. They act in ways which would be appropriate if such a world as they think they live in really existed. But unfortunately it doesn’t exist except in their imaginations. Hence nothing that they do is appropriate to the real world. All their actions are the actions of lunatics, and all, as history is there to demonstrate, are more or less completely disastrous. So much for the romantics. The realists who have studied the nature of the world know that an exclusively humanistic attitude towards life is always fatal, and that all strictly human activities must therefore be made instrumental to animal and spiritual good. They know, in other words, that men’s business is to make the human world safe for animals and spirits. Or perhaps,” he added turning to Jeremy, “perhaps, as an Englishman you prefer Lloyd George’s phrase to Wilson’s: A home fit for heroes to live in—wasn’t that it? A home fit for animals and spirits, for physiology and disinterested consciousness. At present, I’m afraid, it’s profoundly unfit. The world we’ve made for ourselves is a world of sick bodies and insane or criminal personalities. How shall we make this world safe for ourselves as animals and as spirits? If we can answer that question, we’ve discovered what to do.”